Paul Miller has an interesting piece in The Independent on government and cyberspace:

The relationship between government and the internet has always been tense. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel”, typed John Perry Barlow in 1996, “your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter and there is no matter here.”

His Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace spread quickly among the libertarian digerati of the time. For those who craved a space over which governments could have no influence, it was an appealing idea. They also believed that the internet age would herald an era when decentralised technology could do away with the need for government at all.

John Perry Barlow and his friends, of course, were wrong. The internet hasn’t swept away government, neither has the internet completely escaped government intervention… But we’re still just at the beginning of understanding the relationship between government and the ways that the internet can help deliver public goods – sometimes through government itself and sometimes through new lightweight public service start-ups. As we attempt to understand what might be possible, we need to replace Barlow’s black or white ‘cyberspace versus government’ with a new understanding of the way that online tools could help us to live the lives we want to lead….

What Meetup and the hundreds of other online businesses that facilitate real world activity show is that the real power of the net in the future won’t be about information or content – although that’s what we use it for mainly these days – its real power is organisation away from the computer itself. The most successful services will be those with a ‘Why Don’t You’ ethic, which encourages us away from the screen and to be active participants in the world outside….

There was a time when digital technologies were about a new space, detached from the physical. The digerati took William Gibson’s word ‘cyberspace’ and made it their own. This was a place where the pioneers would be safe from governments or corporations or anybody impinging upon their freedom. It didn’t quite turn out like that. Actually, there’s no such thing as cyberspace. Cyberspace is dead. But I don’t think we should mourn it because what we should be working on is much more exciting. What we’ve realised is that the power of the internet is in changing the real world.